Tom Canty – Clapham Lights

Characters in novels are supposed to be likeable, right? We’re supposed to empathise with them, feel their joys and pain. Tom Canty deliberately chucked this idea out the bay-fronted window when he created Mark Hunter, perhaps the biggest cockend in fiction this side of Martin Amis. Mark works in finance on the eve of the credit crunch; he spends obscene amounts of money on terrible drinks, shirts and food, and lives in an overpriced Clapham flat with his old university buddy Craig. This hapless chap works for the kind of estate agent that makes whoever rents out these properties look reputable, and is being shafted in a very similar way to the clients.

Clapham Lights is not a love letter to London. It’s a scraggy postcard with a few tired, heartfelt lines scribbled on the back, something like ‘why won’t you leave me alone, London? Why?’. Funny and recognisable vignettes of city life pepper the pair’s collapse into toxic twentysomething twattery: the dodgy clubs, the terrible jobs, the embarrassing sex. And looming constantly over the whole thing, like the yet-to-be-built Shard, is financial failure and doom. We think it’s got the influence of the aforementioned Amis’s Money running through it like a hangover. In a good way.

Review by Rachel Holdsworth.